Constructive Theology and Gender Variance

With news about the curbing or outright ban on medical care for trans youths in the media nearly every day in the US, and the debate about the validity of trans identities continuing in other parts of the world as well, Susannah Cornwall’s Constructive Theology and Gender Variance: Transformative Creatures is a timely and important contribution to the conversation. Cornwall engages the arguments of both conservative Christians (Catholic and Protestant) and gender-critical radical feminists, noting the valid questions they raise while nevertheless emphasizing their argumentative weaknesses, providing a scientific as well as theological foundation to counter-arguments, and uncovering the ways in which discussions of trans issues reflect deeper concerns about gender and embodiment. While this work of critique is a strong and valuable contribution of Cornwall’s volume, her constructive theology of transformation is a decisive step forward in the so-far limited theological engagement with trans identities. Most importantly, Cornwall includes the voices and experiences of trans people as sources and contributors to her theological project.

Cornwall’s analysis ranges widely. She begins with three chapters in part 1 that “set the scene” in terms of medical and psychological insights as well as theological arguments about trans identities, and then turns to ethical issues related to the autonomy of trans people’s decision making, their truth-telling about their gender identity, and the ethical evaluation of the “artificiality” of their bodies. The third part focuses on bioethical questions related to concerns about the limits of intervening in our bodies, access to medical care, and questions about fertility. Throughout these first three parts, Cornwall also takes up theological arguments related to the ethical, legal, or scientific questions discussed (e.g., theological claims that truth is what is “given” in our bodies and nature, and is supposedly obscured by trans identity, as discussed in chapter 5) and develops her own theological contribution (in the case of the question of truth in chapter 5, she argues, following 1 Cor 13:8–12, that the “truths” about the gender and identities of all of us, not only trans people, are provisional: “The truths we recognize in this realm are only partial: it is as we are known by God that we are known fully” [147]).

However, the fourth and final part offers the most sustained theological reflection. Here, Cornwall unfolds her central argument that all humans are formative but also transformative creatures through anthropological, christological, and eschatological reflections. She returns to and further develops transformation as a deeply theological theme expressed in notions such as conversion and baptism as crises of identity, the fundamental transformation of all through Christ, and of eschatology as the reasoned hope for and orientation toward a world that already is and will be otherwise (especially in chapters 11 and 12). Arguing that boundary-crossing transformation and provisionality of meaning are not unique to trans persons but characteristic of all creatures, Cornwall responds to the concerns about the understanding of gender and being human that underlie debates about trans identities and the anxiety about the consequences if our apparently solid gender system is shown to be precarious and preliminary. Drawing on Linn Tonstad, Cornwall recognizes that “in that sense, the phenomenon of gender transition really does threaten the entire gender system and trans people really are dangerous— not as individuals, certainly not as predators, but because, in showing up as a fault line, they expose the deep cracks running across the entire edifice” (353, emphasis in the original).

Cornwall engages in a deeply knowledgeable, insightful, and creative way with the theological, pastoral, ethical, medical, political, and legal aspects of trans issues, drawing on helpful analogies (such as cochlear implants when considering the limits of technological interventions in bodies, chapter 7) to better understand what really is at stake in the debates about trans concerns. At times, however, this wide range of questions and high degree of detail (e.g., in the discussion of legal cases where trans individuals were charged with “gender-fraud” because they didn’t disclose their trans identity to sexual partners, chapter 6) can cause readers to lose track of the author’s central argument that gender should always be understood as provisional and that all creatures are transformative, and of how the individual parts contribute to developing this argument. Cornwall’s innovative constructive theology of transfiguration and transformation seems to develop in bits and pieces, sometimes relegated to the conclusion of a chapter, which leaves at least me as a constructive theologian wanting to see it more fully developed to do it greater justice, with the wider consequences for other theological questions not only hinted at but outlined in more detail. But perhaps this is due to the complexity of the issue and, not least, to the provisionality of Cornwall’s own theological proposal, which will change and develop as other people engage with it and add their own ideas.

Cornwall’s volume is an original and exceedingly valuable contribution to the social and theological discussions of trans identities and gender variance specifically, and of what it means to be an embodied, ever-changing human being more generally. Cornwall clearly writes out of her UK context, but she also reaches beyond her situation and carefully balances attention to the particular challenges that the UK legal or health care systems pose with broader questions that will resonate with readers across cultural and geographical contexts. While Cornwall deals with complex questions, she does so in a clear, accessible, and engaging way, and both advanced students and scholars from different disciplines (gender studies, cultural theory, [bio-]ethics, and medicine, as well as theology and religious studies) will greatly benefit from reading her volume and engaging with her ideas.

Stefanie Knauss is a professor of theology at Villanova University.

Stefanie Knauss

Date Of Review:

June 6, 2023